Thursday, January 16, 2014

Romancing SaGa III #3 - Morocco

...HARID. Finally, the game begins for real, and with it a blockbuster post. It's time to put the romance into Romancing SaGa. ...Why is that last G capitalized?

Harid comes from the hot sands of Morocco the Naj Desert.

Here's Harid flashbacking to a scene with his Princess. Not sure if they're involved.

...wait a minute, is that Princess Jasmine?

Her name is Fatima, and she calls Harid by his secret name El Nool. Great names all around.

The intro is pretty similar to the others. In retrospect, the only intros I needed to play if I wanted to get the full story were Harid, Mikhail, and Monica. At first I thought they'd all be wildly different, ala Saga Frontier.

Harid gets quite the pack of characters right off the bat.

Wyvern, yet again. Harid's sword is called Kamsheen, another badass name. It can't be unequipped, but he gets a more powerful version of it later on. Also, weapons aren't as crucial to damage output in this game as offensive stats, so having the same weapon for most of the game isn't as big of a deal as it might seem.

Now Harid leads the final charge against Godwin.

THE BATTLE IS JOINED!

This is a little bit Suikoden-like.

Katrina joins Mikhail and Harid as they fight off Godwin's goons. Watch out for that Mikhail. He's a strange one. He might want you to plow his sister in a vampire's house.

Harid just TOLD Mikhail!

Note how Harid says he's going to Lance next. Well, that's where you're supposed to go. But... good luck finding it, since no one gives you a damn clue where Lance is. Even though it's the next area in the plot, I found it about 7 hours later in the game, after doing a ton of other stuff. Since almost all of your money is acquired through the main quest, this means I went with very little money for those 7 hours. Not sure why they made the first area difficult to find, but...eh.

Now Harid...roams around. The world is open, and you're free to travel around and look for quests. The objective is to find and defeat the four elemental Abyss Guardians, scattered around the world in high-tier dungeons.

In pursuit of finding those four guardians (and becoming strong enough to defeat them), you undertake quests. There are a lot of quests, and they're all pretty involved. Of course, you can skip any of them by just not starting them.

It's an interesting game. If there's anything I can compare it to, it's sorta like the World of Ruin in Final Fantasy VI, with four Kefka's Towers hidden in different places.

Moments after this picture was taken, Harid cleared off the table and plowed Ellen on it. Plowed her Othello-style, as the kids call it.

After that kind of vigorous plowing, she has no choice but to join our hero, even though she called him an Uncle Tom earlier. This game is just sick.

They go on a romantic boat ride, as the rocking of the boat gets Ellen's motor running.

"I'M THE QUEEN OF THE WORLD" she yells as Harid does her from behind.

WE'RE PUTTING THE ROMANCE INTO THIS SAGA, DAMN IT!

I stumble across a tournament at this point. It's basically a quest... looks like four matches, each of them a series of one-on-one battles between two teams of five. Did you get all that?

I only have two characters right now, plus we're pretty weak...

...so this doesn't last very long. I'll need to try again later. This is clearly intended for much more powerful teams of characters. The downside of an open world like this is that you often stumble into things you can't do yet and get totally destroyed. Later open-world WRPGs like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion would fix this by scaling the world to your character's level. Which has its own set of problems, but that's a discussion for another day.

Some pink-haired kid runs up to our heroes and catches them. Weird-ass. This is the debut of Candy, the most annoying character in this game. Rue the day that she focuses her beady eyes on our hero. Rue the day.

Woman: "Oh My God! THERE'S A BLACK MAN TALKING TO ME! HELP!"

Meanwhile, Harid learns his first spell: Earth Heal. It levels up just like everything else. Like the other SaGa games, this one divides spells and special attacks and they each have their own usage points. He can special attack away and still have MP laying in wait for Earth Heal. I'd have given the spell to Ellen instead since her attacks are weaker, but I don't know how long I'll have her.

Is that the Iron Sheik? "Iran, Number One!"

That's a great Inn sign. I like how you leave footprints in the snow in this game.

At this point I accepted a quest to venture into a cave filled with rats. And I mean filled.

I try to leave, but some douchebag seals me in. The hell is this?

"I am so seriously pissed-off right now" booms Harid.

Those slimes look like refugees from Lufia 2.

OH MY GOD. The "music" for this fight is the most horrible noise imaginable. Dozens of rat squeaks overlapping each other.

...and they killed me. I had no chance against so many rats.

Luckily, I can run away from the fight. Do so, and this random girl shows up to free Harid.

I head off to a nearby mansion, home of a lady who can make rat poison.

...she's also quite foxy.

She builds herself up a lot, probably because she wants to impress Harid. It isn't every day that she's visited by... a man.

4 comments:

I really like how many female characters are in this game, just living their lives and not worrying about men.Harid has way more HP than the other characters right off the bat.Non-linear games are much harder to program, but it seems like this game does a decent job of it at least.Wonder how they got the rat sounds and hope that's not in the game's soundtrack. You haven't mentioned the music at all, btw, so I assume it's just average.

The music is a bit on the average side, yes. Surprising because SaGa Frontier has an -incredible- soundtrack. But that's just my opinion, a lot of people would probably love the soundtrack of this game. There are a few standout battle themes, in particular.